Good overview - helps relate to implementation concepts. What about approach / process concepts and issues? Coverage/Path/Thread, Regression ... some of which you hinted at or alluded to here. Still wanting to tie Specification to Test Plan to how to transition test plan to functional verification on target tools - a few slides would help if any of that makes sense.

I would ask if the analog portion can be abstracted up to operate in a digital environment. Take a look at real-number modeling as an example. This gives you digital types of performance but the ability to include voltages etc. The bad news is that it does not handle feeedback well.

Thanks alot Brian for the wonderfull presentation. I have one question, Considering an application in which you have a device that does some analog sensing and complex decision making based on the raw and processed data, how should one proceed with firmware verification??

@Suraj - if you can ever say - if this does not work we are dead! It must be 100% certain that we have no problems with this. Then you should look at formal. Typically this is for bus protocols, life critical functionality etc.

There is a free version of OrCad tools I believe - take a look at this http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/practical-chip-design/4406145/Book-review--Analog-Design-and-Simulation-using-OrCAD-Capture-and-PSpice

@Brain: I understand the differnce beteween Dynamic and Formal/Static Verification - but because both methdologies offer different capabilities - I believe we would need to use both when trying to verfiy the design spec and functionality of a system? If true, which of the two is more beneficial/critical when modeling large systems?

@ tariq786 - exactly. The good news today is that there is more concurrency in designs compared to when I was working on the problem. That makes the improvements better, but at some point when trying to do a whole chip, simulators are too slow for most verification objectives.

In some respects an emulator is a highly parallel processor specifically designed for the purpose of simulation. It is built with a very high-speed and dedicated interconnect fabric to get the necessary speed.

multi-procesors simulators do not provide enough speed. This has been tried for decades with digital simulation and can only produce modest amounts of speedup. It is because of the way they operate. Analog simulators can be sped up more.

Compared vs silicon you need weeks to months to have a new chip to test. Simulators are very fast. You may only need to tweak a couple of lines and there you go. Also as typically it is for snall blocks you may be able to contact a few designers to do a change. Opposite to a large DUT in an emulator, you more likely need to contact more layers of designers (digial and analog ones).

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Brian, you are correct; GPS was the brainchild of a DOD scientist and MIT scholar, Dr. Ivan Gething. The Raytheon Corporation where he worked was instrumental in development of the first prototype circa 1951. Not sure there was a lot of micro circuitry back then, but throughout the years contractors like Raytheon, Booze Allen, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, have done considerable work refining GPS and making it what it is today. Hope this helps!

Re GPS: True the military did the initial development, but when they decided to allow commercial use, the industry took off. Someone had to develop the chipsets that are in every Garmin,smart phone, surveying instrument, marine navigation, etc.

The approach they used enabled them to integrate the TSVs with minimal disruption to the 20nm-LPM platform technology, demonstrating SRAM functionality with critical device characteristics in line with those of standard 20nm-LPM silicon.

@gordonmx It seems to be the first 25 that login to the chat. The first three or four classes I attended I didn't login until a few minutes before the lecture starts. During them I never got a Starbucks card. The last class or two I started logging in around noon Eastern and I got a card today.

There seems to be a number who log in just for the Starbucks card. Some have logged in almost a week in advance. So I'm curious, is it the 1st 25 who log into the site or the 1st 25 who click on the audio at the start of the session?

I received one of the Starbucks eGift cards from Design News in my email today. Because I usually just look at the from and delete anything that looks like it's from marketing I almost deleted the email without reading it. Fortunately I glanced at the subject and it mentioned Design News but with all the spam we get it would be easy to miss one of the eGift card emails.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

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